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A comment on GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’. Parent comment

Re:GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’ by Armisael16 on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @06:31PM (#16371948)
NVidia's sales and margins haven't really been growing. They buy fab time way in advance and sell to third-party vendors at a fixed price. They aren't selling more units, and the third-party vendors are netting all the profits.

Worse yet, if nv does invest in more card production they run the risk of bringing that online just at the crypto market crashes, when there will be much less demand for cards and a flood of old mining cards on the used market.

Worse yet, if gamers can't buy your cards you lose loyalty (can't build it with newbies and old hands slowly forget). If you don't believe that gamers are unhappy then you simply haven't been paying attention.

This is an appalling situation for Nvidia (and AMD - all the same reasons apply to them too).

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Re:GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’ by Const-me on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @09:31PM (#16372943)
> if nv does invest in more card production they run the risk of bringing that online just at the crypto market crashes, when there will be much less demand for cards and a flood of old mining cards on the used market

Are you saying they shouldn’t manufacture & sell more card now because that this will cost them future sales? Can’t they just put that extra income in a bank and earn nice interests on the profits that are shifted from future to present due to that crypto craziness?

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Re:GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’ by thirtyseven on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @09:36PM (#16372965)
Chip fab has high fixed costs that take time to recoup. If they build more capacity now for demand that evaporates by the time it comes online, they are out a huge amount of $$.
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Re:GPU Hoarding: ‘I Felt Like I Was Buying Drugs’ by Const-me on Tuesday February 13, 2018 @10:17PM (#16373148)
> Chip fab has high fixed costs

How’s that relevant? nVidia has no chip fabs.

They use third party services. Currently TSMC but if TSMC is overbooked there’re others, e.g. for the current-gen GPUs nVidia also considered Samsung but apparently got better deal from TSMC.

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